Death is harder on those who are left behind.

Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in...

There are as many sorrows as there are people who feel them and there are no rules…It is solitary… Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you – others may...

Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.

It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I...

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

Death doesn’t happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you’re okay. But my life was...

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around...

Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind.

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into...

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel...

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and...

Sometime when I cry I’m not sure if it’s grief or relief.

A funeral is no place for secrets.

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Faris turned on him. “Why choose to wear black today, of all days? I know why I’m in black. Why are you? Mourning?He looked startled. “One does not wear mourning for a servant.”You still don’t...

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will...

… he wasn’t crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

…what happens when you returnand find nothingbut a hollowed shell,shingles and floor,walls and echoesand the light that lead you herehas now burned outand the ones who built ithave traveled afarand you cant go to them,no...

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us...

I never dreamed that I’d meet somebody like you.And I never dreamed that I’d lose somebody like you.No, I don’t want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)No, I don’t...

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if...

Imagine going a long time without seeing someone you love. Then after months or years getting the moment to see them and catch up. I think that’s what death is like. Going a long time...

Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.

…gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

You are alone”Rose colored memories drown,taking their last breath.

But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

I miss you so much in these wee morning hours,when the depth of the night sets my spirit free.When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the worldbut the beauty...

I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked …and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been...

There need not be a purpose to a person’s death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was...

How can I grieve what is still in motion?” I ask her. “Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding,” I say. “It´s Normandy out there.

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free....

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It’s hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

He was like the other half of myself,’ says Boris…Ulrich says, ‘You haven’t lost {him}, you know. I don’t know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know...